Why Countries Are Trying to Ban TikTok

board in a meeting, flight delayed. TikTok is here to keep you entertained 15 to 60 seconds at a time. TikTok started in 2017 with an emphasis on short form content in that format, has taken the world by storm. Today, it's used by over 150 million Americans and therein lives the problem. TikTok owes a lot of its success to the 2020 pandemic and has seen more than

3 billion downloads in three short years, guys, $3 billion. That's almost half the population of the earth. So yeah, I think it's fair to say it's become pretty popular. And ironically, TikTok owes a lot of that success to their competitors. Let's go back to the start for a second. Byte Dance, the parent company of TikTok started in China in 2012. Byte Dance found its first hit

app with headlines, a news app that tailored the headlines to the user. What set this app apart from any other news app was just how well the personalization algorithm worked. Users would open the app and then click on the articles that they were interested in. The algorithm meticulously learned what the users' interests were and then fed them back articles that would interest them in real time.

Byte Dance CEO, Sho Choo saw the success of the headlines app and wondered if the algorithm would work as well on an app that made short videos. So in 2016, they launched Du Yin, the Chinese version of TikTok. It's pretty much the same, just with a lot more Chinese language options, a section about just how wonderful the Chinese government is and how they are never wrong.

Most social media networks are based on your social circle, who you follow like, subscribe, et cetera. TikTok is based all around you, using the same formula as their headlines app only with videos. The variables given to the algorithm to better understand who you are, much more numerous, giving you a much more nuanced curation of content. That sounds like a lot, so let me simplify if you

like kittens and surfing and baking brownies. TikTok's algorithm is going to find a cat in a wetsuit hanging 10 through the curl, followed by a delicious brownie recipe. TikTok's layout and presentation are down right addictive. The feedback loop is carefully curated to your interests. The addictive behavior and sensory overload feedback loops are similar in some ways to slot machines. But the difference is, with a slot

machine, eventually you must stop, because you lost the kid's college fund waiting on that waitress to come back with your complimentary long island iced tea. Hey, remember earlier, when I mentioned that TikTok goes a lot of its success to its competitors? That is an understatement to say the least. By dance, how to genius marketing plan. Have you ever heard of the phrase, if you can't beat

them, join them? TikTok strategy could best be described as, let's join them to beat them. TikTok admired Facebook and YouTube. They admired them so much that they paid a bunch of their top employees and influencers to come join them on TikTok. Then they spent billions of dollars running ads on Facebook and YouTube, literally driving traffic to TikTok directly from its competitors. That's, that's just evil, genius

level brilliant. Facebook and YouTube underestimated TikTok's ability to penetrate the market, and now look at them. Copying TikTok features in format, and they can't even be mad at it, because they were basically their biggest advertising customers. And, last to leave what added to TikTok's meteoric rise was their ability to generate both content and new users. By dance knew that, for TikTok to be successful, they would

both need quality content and a quantity of users. So to get more content, they filled their app with editing features that would take most people years to learn on more complex software. They promoted challenges that gave everyone a common inspiration to create on. You've probably had someone dozing themselves in ice water or falling off milk crates crossing your screen at some point, or maybe a friend,

family member, or coworker has dragged you over to their phone, set up in selfie mode to attempt the next hottest TikTok dance trend. TikTok has also made it a lot easier to go viral. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have aggregation that makes it harder to go viral on their platforms. TikTok shows lots of love to the little guy. By seemingly making the little guy the big guy

overnight, and as mentioned earlier, they snagged a few top influencers from the other major platforms, and that my friends is the recipe for three billion users on your app. The worldwide version of TikTok has only been around for five years, and they have more money than Netflix. They were able to reach market penetration that took Facebook five years in less than half that time, and they

have unseated YouTube as the go-to video app the world over. By dance scored their biggest victory with TikTok, but it has by no means come without scrutiny and scandal. You might remember a few years back when a certain orange-looking commander in chief once vowed to ban TikTok from the US? That is not an unfounded concern. The UK, EU, Canada, and New Zealand have banned top political

officials from having the app on their personal devices. Several US state government officials follow a similar protocol. India and neighboring Pakistan have banned TikTok and also dozens of other Chinese apps, such as WeChat from the country entirely because TikTok potentially poses a national security threat. China's views on personal privacy and corporate standards and practices are different. Any company doing business in China must comply fully with

the Chinese government and hand over any resources upon request as the government sees fit. Kind of terrifying, right? Yeah, while it's even worse for tech companies, apps like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are banned in China. And the Chinese government uses apps like WeChat to monitor its citizens' posts and whereabouts allegedly. Should those citizens do anything the government does not like, the government can use those apps

to freeze assets, stop them from traveling, or their location data can be used to round them up for incarceration allegedly. Byte Dance is very much a Chinese corporation. If the Chinese government uses apps to spy on its own citizens, what's there to stop them from spying on hours? The Biden administration has signed a legislation before to ban TikTok from government devices and are currently pushing show

chew and TikTok to sell the app to an American company. But we are not exactly sure if the US government has the ability to ban the app altogether from use in America due to the rights granted under the First Amendment. They are also considering legislation that would prevent TikTok from selling ads in between videos or even updating the software version, which would effectively kill the app

in the US. These negotiations are still ongoing, so we will be sure to keep you updated on this situation in future videos. Give us a like and subscribe if you haven't already. At the time of this recording, show chew will have testified before Congress. During his testimony, he stated that TikTok is committed to the safety of young people, a firewall for US data, full transparency, and

that the app will remain a place of free expression without government manipulation. He has maintained that TikTok's data is not stored in China but in Singapore, and he's expressed plans to store data in the US and Norway on third party servers. Only time will tell if TikTok ends up getting banned from the US for consumers to download. Today, TikTok has over 150 million users and is

used by over five million American businesses. On the surface, the app seems harmless, but TikTok can access the user's calendar, other running applications, Wi-Fi networks, and even the SIM card serial number. The location data in user calendar could be a security risk for US officials, but the counter argument to this claim is apps like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram already collect user data for various purposes, the

differences. These companies are founded and maintained on American soil. I guess lawmakers and congressional candidates feel that the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. So what happens if the US government does? Shot down TikTok? Personally, I think they'll be all right. They already have hundreds of millions of users in China and roughly the same number around the world. When India banned it

in 58 other Chinese apps, TikTok instantly lost 200 million users, and by dance did not bat an eye, but the loss of revenue from those 5 million US businesses might have a sting to it. It's too early to tell what's going to happen with the future of TikTok in the USA. So in the meantime, enjoy your favorite content creators. Like them, subscribe to them, follow their

various channels, and by them I mean us, the richest. Hopefully this video shed some light on the TikTok situation. Thanks for watching. Do you think that the mafia is mistaken? I didn't realize that. I think the trend pop. Les, just do it. No, thank you. Some people are using Pokirell's manifestos, and on how to control the non- maior number of hacking codes. I think the world

is looking to go through all of that. The wall is looking to go over. So there's something. What happens? We walk through sometimes in aiez and when you do something over there, how do youSSL want to record the jump? Are the ranked politicians ofakh. W fifama? All of them want to do something over there? Not any plug slate. Why can't an official vote do this yet?

Know what? Why? We have a decide issues. This isn't all thinking about China. And that should be transparent. Thank you.